Onbashira Diptych - Skid et Thr(o)ugh

Onbashira is a legendary festival in central Japan, held every six years for the past twelve hundred years. To celebrate renewal, devotees descend a steep mountainside, riding enormous tree trunks, which they bring to the local shrines. The Onbashira ritual is thus not only associated with danger, but also with bravery and transcendence.

Fascinated by rituals and states of danger, Damien Jalet aptly chose this title for the evening that brings together his pieces, Skid and Thr(o)ugh. In the first, a 34° slope evokes a mountain, and in the second, a gigantic cylinder recalls the motif of the tree trunk. The impressive set design positions the dancers between command and imbalance, challenging them to wrestle with forces beyond their control and, ultimately, to trust one another.

Oscillating between verticality and horizontality, Skid seems more peaceful. To Christian Fennesz's electro-acoustic music, inspired by Mahler's symphonies, the dancers surrender and resist, rise and fall, drawing the lines of a physical story between appearance and disappearance. At times epic, dangerous, humorous and moving, the slope of Skid prevents stillness and creates a chain reaction of physical and emotional events.

The notion of danger is therefore ubiquitous, in particular in Thr(o)ugh, which Damien Jalet created a few months after witnessing the November 2015 Paris attacks. The piece bears the traces of this experience of mortal danger: in the rotating cylinder on stage, the performers move in a manner reminiscent of crash-test dummies and ghosts, and motionlessness becomes symbolic of death.

In both pieces, physical contact with others is often the only way to ward off danger, the only solace in the face of the call of the void or in those inexorable moments when time and place determine our future.